The Anatomy of Doubt

Have you ever felt like you were navigating life without a compass, as though there were no absolute bearings any more, only vague signposts?

Well I spent most of my teens and twenties in that state, without really knowing what the problem was.

Then one night in my early thirties I was sitting in my living room watching Apocalypse now. Toward the end of the film, Marlon Brando’s character, Colonel Kurtz, asks this question:

If everything around you was in doubt, could you still trust yourself?

My world stood still in that moment, and I was no longer watching a movie. Never, in all my years of therapy had I ever been asked such a direct and poignant question about the state of my mind, or my life.

Dante called it la selva oscura, or the dark woods; St John of the Cross defined it as the dark night of the soul; and my psychiatrist labelled it Major Depressive Disorder.

But regardless of its name, it was a state of limbo, where nothing made sense or had meaning, where there was no longer any ground beneath your feet. Life no longer happened in vivid Technicolor, but was replaced with shades of grey. It was a state not worth living in, but luckily I retained an iron will to live.

The main thing that helped me hold onto life during this time was climbing, and as it turned out my greatest lessons in trust would come out of engaging in this sport. While every outing was an exercise in trust for me – trust in myself, my partner, and the mountains – there was one time that stands out above all others.

My partner Grant and I drove up the parkway one evening so we could camp in his van and be poised to climb Ice Nine, a route that rarely came in and that neither of us had climbed. Early the next morning, after drinking coffee and having a bite to eat, we drove to the pullout on the side of the road beneath the climb, where we threw on our packs, and headed up the trail. About ten minutes into the approach, I turned around and said to Grant: “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I feel as though I’m going to die if we climb this route today.” Grant didn’t bat an eyelash, but instead told me that he would be happy to turn around and drive back to Canmore.

Later that day, we ran into our friend Louis outside the liquor store. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked. “A woman died at the base of Ice Nine this morning while she was belaying her partner. The hanging daggers fell off and she was buried under forty tonnes of ice.”

In that moment I was struck by the knowledge that listening to my instincts that day had saved my life. I realized that no matter how chaotic the world seemed to be, I possessed an internal navigating system to guide me through the maelstrom.

We can all take something from the Brandon quote: all of us have an internal compass, we just need to trust ourselves.